The circumstances that led
to my watching “Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever” are surprisingly mundane. It
was a Friday night. The kids decided to spend the evening at their cousins’
house. Ang was going through e-mail that had piled up through the week. I was
doing some similar cleaning on my computer. I figured the wife and I would take
in a couple of catch up television episodes while we waited for the kids to get
back. I turned the TV on just to have some noise in the background. Before I
knew it, Ang had gone to bed and I was stuck watching a bad Lifetime Christmas
special starring an Internet meme sensation from a year ago.

True, I didn’t really watch
it. I didn’t really have to in order to follow it’s “Paul Blart: Mall Cop”
story about a shopping mall heist that involves a socially inept girl who can
somehow hear Grumpy Cat’s thoughts in the role of Blart. Frankly, that’s as
much of the plot I want to discuss.

What’s really strange about
this abysmal failure of a movie is how aware it and its filmmakers seem to be
of that very fact. I’ve never seen a movie so willing to offer up its own
criticisms against itself. There are many asides by the titular cat explaining
how bad this movie is going to be, is being and has been. You’d think this
would be a bright spot in the film, especially with the usually wonderful Aubrey
Plaza providing Grumpy’s voice. Unfortunately, Plaza delivers her lines as if
she might be the prime suspect in the homicide investigation into her agent’s
death by foul play. What’s worse is that her lines of deriding criticism over
the very film her voice is in don’t come across as funny, rather they’re merely
accurate.

I don’t think there’s a person on this planet that actually expected “Grumpy
Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever” to be any good, a blanket statement that apparently
includes the movie’s writers. This would explain their attempt to diffuse this
notion with jokes about how bad the movie is, but how did this not actually
work as a preemptive tactic, at least in a minimal sense? I don’t know. It’s a
unique approach, but it still does nothing to save this sad attempt to cash in
on a passing fad from being anything other than a sad attempt to cash in on an
already dead fad.

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About Me

Andrew D. WellsAndrew is a professionally trained actor and stage director. He was a reporter for the daily newspaper The Marshall Democrat-News. He has been critiquing film since Mr. Lucas released the first of his "Star Wars" prequels in 1999. His reviews can also be seen atMarshall Democrat-News